One major concern in the field of medicine is related to the distribution, sales and use of counterfeit drugs and other pharmaceutical products. In many countries around the world, medicines that are distributed and sold are fake, i.e. counterfeit. These counterfeit medicines are deliberately and fraudulently mislabeled with respect to identity and/or source. They can range from unknown random combinations of toxic substances to ineffective, inactive preparations, such as lacking an active ingredient. The results of counterfeit drugs are that either there is an ineffective treatment, a harmful outcome, or even worse, death, for a patient or other end user of the medicine.
In January 2010, the World Health Organization published an article on counterfeit drugs, describing the major health concern related with these illegal medicines. One counterfeit medicine for lowering blood sugar levels resulted in two deaths and nine hospitalizations in 2009 alone. In the United Republic of Tanzania in 2009, an antimalarial drug (Metakelfin) lacking sufficient level of the active ingredient was discovered in 40 pharmacies. This is particularly problematic in countries having weaknesses in their regulatory and enforcement systems. An estimated 1 in 4 packets of medicine sold in the street markets in developing countries is believed to be counterfeit. Over 50% of the medicines purchased over the Internet are from illegal sites that conceal their physical address, and have been found to be counterfeit.
More generally, in this environment (and even that of more-developed countries), a pharmaceutical manufacturer typically has little to no interaction or review of the sales of their medicines. After distributing their products to representatives or directly to end users, the pharmaceutical company does not communicate with the user thereafter. Likewise, the medical distributor simply sells products, with no feedback from users or sales information pertaining to the users. There is no interaction between the users of the medicines and the providers (manufacturers or distributors) or the products. There is not an effective way of eliminating these counterfeit medicines, accordingly there is a need for a system that verifies the validity of medicines, for the sake of all parties involved, particularly the end user of the medicine.
Moreover, distribution data in many emerging markets is often not accurate and/or is delayed. In general, drug distribution information is collected from pharmacy inventories and doctor prescriptions. In markets where pharmacies do not keep detailed real time electronic inventories or where patients regularly purchase drugs without a prescription, accurate distribution data is difficult, if not impossible, to gather. Any data that is gathered disadvantageously has a delay between the sale of medicines and the time the data is available to manufacturers and other parties involved in drug delivery.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system and method for generating and managing product authentication codes that are used in distribution of pharmaceutical drugs. Such a system should desirably provide a plurality of unique product authentication codes.